A lot of the content from the guide has been added to and published on our blog. Below is a quick overview of those posts:

1. Getting started with Employee Surveys
   A summary of the survey process from start to finish. First task: Define the purpose
2. Hearing and believing: Good employee surveys need GREAT communication
   Promote the survey! Planning communications throughout the study, and in advance, is essential for success
3. Choosing to print your questionnaire or email the survey
   Benefits and costs of online versus printed surveys
4. Employee Surveys – to outsource or manage in-house?
   Expertise, technical capability, resources, experience and speed… and improved anonymity
5. Essential survey questions: Willingness to recommend
   “Would you recommend” is an insightful question to include in most surveys
6. Choosing questions to ask in an employee survey
   Looking at more questions and themes in employee surveys
7. Survey scales – can I use a 3/5/7/10 point scale?
   Choose a range of answers that works for you
8. Using verbatim comments in an employee survey
   Tips on asking (and analysing) open-ended questions in a survey
9. A checklist for testing your survey before you launch
   Things to test and look out for before your let your survey loose!
10. Your survey has launched – what next?
    Monitor your survey and email inbox in case staff ask for help
11. How to analyse your employee survey’s results
    An overview of making sense of the results and what to do with them

If you would like a PDF copy of our guide (A How-To Guide for Better Employee Surveys) from which some of the articles above are drawn please email me – hello@surveylab.co.uk. We are happy to help!

Want to read more?!

Use the ‘Filter Posts by Category’ links on the right hand side of the page to browse all posts under a topic, e.g. Employee Surveys. Other popular posts that may be of interest are:

• How much does an employee survey cost?
• How do you link employee engagement to customer satisfaction?
• What is an average survey response rate?

We welcome any feedback or feel free to ask questions: email us, post a comment or follow me on Twitter!

A while ago, I came across some excellent (and simple) guidelines that can help managers identify whether changes in their survey results over time are important or not. We often use similar approaches when we help a client make sense of their results, but Jack Wiley, the author of Strategic Employee Surveys, describes his method clearly with good examples to explain. His guidelines are (my words):

If the unit (e.g. team/department/region) has less than 50 responses an increase or decrease of 15% or more is a “practically” significant change.

If the unit has between fifty and 100 responses – a change of 10% is significant.

More than 100 responses – the change is significant if the results have increased or decreased by 5%.

For example, in a team of 20 people, each person’s score contributes a minimum of 5% to the score that will be reported for the team. This means that just 3 or 4 people’s answers can affect the score noticeably, so the smaller the group, the larger the difference required (which is a basic rule of statistics).

Mr Wiley does mention a couple of limitations (these guidelines are for small organisations/units and aimed at comparing a question’s scores over time) – but hopefully this tip helps the odd H.R. Manager or head of department recognise what some of the numbers mean!

I highly recommend the book Strategic Employee Surveys: Evidence-Based Guidelines for Driving Organizational Success – also reviewed in the CIPD magazine (sign-up required).

The responses are collated, the data aggregated and results churned out. Some proper analysis follows, reports produced, culminating in discussions and investigations, changes and improvements. Powerful stuff!

If this happens at your organisation – well done.

Customers are individuals too

But what happens to the dissatisfied customer(s) in the process above? There is an assumption that any issue the customer has will already have been reported (and resolved) or is being dealt with via official channels. However, for the customer the survey is another way to try and engage the organisation to address their issue(s). Make the most of this opportunity! In addition to providing aggregated data that will create insight and actionable findings, a customer survey can pay for itself by helping perform ‘service recovery’ amongst dissatisfied customers.

This is why so many people love Twitter – you can shout beetlejuice three times and as if by magic the shopkeeper appears.

Using a customer survey to perform ‘service recovery’

It should be relatively easy to tweak a customer survey by adding the question

Would you like [name of organisation] to personally contact you about your feedback?

When the survey is completed, an email can then be triggered or details appended to a daily report that will be reviewed and acted upon by an escalation team. Turning disgruntled customers into satisfied customers can increase loyalty substantially resulting in repeat business and referrals that can be worth a lot more than the cost of conducting the customer survey.

Identifying ‘Customers at Risk’

The survey process may also be modified to identify what we call ‘Customers at Risk’. These customers may not ask to be personally contacted (or you may not offer the option in the survey), but if a response meets pre-defined criteria (for example, willingness to recommend scores 6 or less on a 10 point scale) then these customers will be tagged as at risk. Again, this information should be passed to an escalation team for review and remedial action.

If you do use service recovery, remember you cannot claim the survey is anonymous and strictly confidential to respondents. Consideration should also be made for how customer at risk information is shared within the organisation.

Service recovery is most successful when used in a ‘transactional survey’ (i.e. a survey to customers who recently completed a ‘transaction’ be it a purchase or other form of contact). The survey needs to follow as soon as possible after the transaction so that the experience is still fresh in the customer’s mind and also close enough to the event that feedback remains actionable and relevant. It may not be possible or practical to conduct your surveys regularly (monthly) but aim for as timely as you can.

A well handled problem builds more loyalty than no problem at all

Occasionally, a survey detractor will argue that the organisation asks the questions but doesn’t listen to the customer. However, a good customer survey can deliver more than insight and answers; it can directly lead to more loyal customers!

You may also like:

1. Getting Customer Feedback: Do it right or don’t do it at all
2. Five Tips for a better customer survey in 2012

Planning a customer survey in 2012? Surveylab has years of experience designing, implementing and managing customer feedback programmes (and more from past careers and partnering with specialist consultancies). Contact us for an informal chat to discuss your plans. We’re happy to help.

A well designed customer feedback survey will deliver actionable data. If the survey is used simply to tell your staff how good you have been, and nothing more is done with the results, then yes, the survey has not lived up to its potential.

For example, a carefully designed customer survey can tell an organisation not only when something is a recurring problem, but also how much that problem costs in terms of lost business or the subsequent support, which helps prioritise follow-up actions.

And this is the key: follow-up action.

The survey is a tool. It provides results that need to be analysed to deliver answers/insight/information/findings on which the organisation can act. Whether you use Net Promoter or ServQual, a five point scale (or four or seven) is not important. It’s what you do with the results afterwards that counts.

Social media is the same but currently is drawing a lot of attention and effort into using it effectively. Twitter and facebook are excellent tools to engage with customers and collect feedback, but I don’t see them as a replacement to the survey… just yet.

Need help designing/implementing a customer feedback survey? Talk to Surveylab.

1. Are you measuring what’s important?

Does your survey generate actionable data, or is it a scorecard that simply allows you to pat yourself on the back when the results are published?

If your survey wasn’t reviewed during 2011, re-evaluate your survey in early 2012. We often hear a requirement that “we want to keep this and that because we want to compare to last year” but are these items still relevant and important today? Key drivers of customer loyalty may need revising, especially if your organisation has undergone significant change in recent years.

2. Keep the survey short

I say this all the time. Customers will complete surveys, but they are busy, and online surveys have a lot more to compete with for attention today than five years ago. A prize-draw incentive doesn’t often make a lot of difference; the customer survey is a chance to give feedback in the hope of improved or continued good products/services in future – and this shouldn’t be taking more than ten minutes to complete.

3. Run surveys more frequently

Some customer research is better conducted as a ‘transactional survey’ because customers will not remember details over time. For example, feedback on complaint handling or product repair should be requested within days/week of the contact, rather than presented as another section of an annual customer survey. Why wait 12 months for an update on progress?

4. Use surveys to perform service recovery

A survey can pay for itself by helping service recovery amongst unhappy customers. Customers often want information and for their voice to be heard, not compensation (PDF link), and adding email alerts to notify relevant teams about dissatisfied customers is easy to do. ‘Customer at Risk’ reports help identify recurring problems too, and when combined with running surveys more frequently it is a lot easier to convert the disgruntled customer into a satisfied customer (or perhaps a raving fan!).

5. Conduct proper analysis and act on findings

What happens after the survey reports are published? Who gets the feedback?

Don’t restrict results to senior management – local managers and front line staff can benefit from, even be inspired by, customer insights too (although keep it relevant). Your staff may even have recommendations(!) and can take action from the ground up, rather than wait for direction to filter down.

Planning a customer survey in 2012? Surveylab offers more than professionally designed surveys and easy-to-use reports. We have years of experience designing, implementing and managing customer feedback programmes (and more from past careers and partnering with specialist consultancies). Get in touch!

Occasionally, one of our potential clients has a similar reaction to Surveylab’s quote (which usually falls between £1,000 and £3,000) – they think

“but there are a plethora of services where I can do it myself for £50!”

Comparing apples and pears

This may be true, but the point is that YOU have to do it. As a survey company, we bring specific skills and experience to the project, much like a kitchen installer does when fitting a new kitchen. Keeping with my analogy, the kitchen installer can also help design the kitchen and provide after-sales care.

Positioned correctly, using an external survey company demonstrates to staff the importance in the survey and desire to ‘get it right’, with the added benefit of ensuring respondent anonymity. (sorry, couldn’t think of another kitchen analogy.)

Value for money?

This is the obvious question any buyer should be asking. In the case of an employee survey, if you have 150 staff, and outsourcing your survey costs £1,650, this equates to a cost of £11/employee to ask questions and get feedback from all your staff in a quick and efficient process. There are hidden costs (most significant will be your time) and perhaps the expense of printing and mailing letters, but £11 to engage and listen to each and every one of your staff is a very small cost that can deliver superb value.

For 1,000 staff, the cost is much less – in this example just £1.65. Expenses may be a little higher, but economies of scale should apply with everything except for any postage.

Ultimately, it’s what you do after the survey is closed that really determines whether your survey was value for money.

Set Expectations for Delivering Feedback

Reviewing results is a relatively straight forward task, but a comprehensive analysis can be time consuming, and then you will still, invariably, need to prepare management reports, plans of action and feedback to staff. Often, there can be pressure from senior management to publish the results as soon as possible so set a timetable that allows you sufficient time to understand the results and prepare the report(s). (Reviewing and summarising open-ended comments can take days.)

Quick tip: Soon after the survey has closed thank everyone for their time and feedback – let them know how many took part, perhaps a very top-level finding, and – importantly – when results will be published or reviewed by management.

Take Time to Understand the Results

Start with the ‘what’ – what your staff are saying.

Use ‘Index’ scores to summarise areas and identify strengths and weaknesses. This is especially useful when reviewing or comparing results between departments/teams/regions because it reduces how many numbers you need to look at. You may still want to drill-down into some of these scores to see how the score was formed – e.g. are there lots of strongly agree/disagree answers?

Quick tip: Sometimes, reporting the percentage answering “strongly agree” or “very satisfied” (or the other end of the scale) is more eye-catching than an Index score.

Nearly all organisations want to examine the variance across different parts of the organisation or by types of employee. You may also find it helpful to break-down the verbatim comments by departments or regions to review and/or categorise the comments in smaller, easier-to-manage chunks.

Then, look for the ‘why’.

Insight can be found by filtering results by demographics (e.g. department or job-role). The open-ended comments will also help to explain why staff have answered the way they have. A simple and quick way to get a feel for what has been written is to create a word cloud. This can help pick out the common themes, so you can then filter comments by the popular words in a more logical, faster way.

Prepare Management Reports

Once you know the what and why, you can prepare reports and share findings.

Quick tip: Employee surveys can generate huge amounts of data and it can be difficult to decide how much detail to include in management reports. Keep the management summary report short and concise.

Include a selection of (not all) the open-ended comments in your reports to support or explain the numbers.

Share Findings and Take Action!

Armed with reports and proper analysis, senior management can establish priorities, and share more findings with the workforce. At this point, employees may be involved again for recommendations and help in drawing up the action plans.

More Suggestions?

The key message is give yourself enough time necessary to do your survey justice. If you’ve conducted employee surveys before, can you share any tips? What presents the biggest challenge? Please leave a comment below  or tweet me – twitter.com/#!Dan_atSurveylab

Lots of comments, views, ideas and more questions ensued, exploring the customer engagement in particular. Yet, the employee engagement side has been bugging me ever since so I thought I would try and summarise my own thoughts and observations to the question, How can we prove employee engagement makes a difference?

What is Engagement?

There are many definitions of employee engagement on Google, but the one we like to refer to comes from the Institute for Employment Studies:

A positive attitude held by the employee towards the organisation and its values. An engaged employee is aware of the business context, and works with colleagues to improve performance within the job for the benefit of the organisation. The organisation must work to develop and nurture engagement which requires a two-way relationship between employee and employer.

Therefore, employee engagement assumes mutual respect between management and staff and relies on sound two-way communication. The challenge is that ‘Engagement’ needs to be understood, quantified (some how) and monitored.

Engagement is often treated as a project – this quarter management will be engaging with staff … – but it is a continuous/ongoing process. We have to tap into what creates engagement, and figure out where it is strong and where it needs improving. Effectively, an employee engagement survey will measure the drivers of engagement to determine how engaged (or disengaged) the workforce is. (Just checking for Job Satisfaction is not the answer because it’s only one factor – e.g. staff can be satisfied with their job but not actually perform any meaningful work. Job satisfaction on its own does not equate to high performance in an organisation.)

Joined-Up Surveys

Creating a survey to measure employee engagement isn’t rocket science – and I’m sure many organisations get it right (there is no magic formula, although the variations between organisations’ surveys share common themes). However, it is rare for an employee survey to be planned and conducted in unison with another survey aimed at customers/measuring customer satisfaction.

Can you join up results from your employee and customer surveys?

This is likely to be a challenge if the demographic data for teams/locations is not consistent between your employee survey and your customer survey. Some business units will only have internal customers and don’t often have their own internal customer survey, restricting what analysis can be done.

A simple solution may be to take the results of your employee survey and review the numbers by departments/locations, and correlate these results with financial performance, for example, sales figures at each store. This isn’t perfect as other factors need to be taken into account, but patterns should emerge – here are good leaders, or examples of good communications, etc.

Start small and simple

We have been analysing the results of an employee survey for a business with depots nationwide. Some of the engagement scores have 100% variation or greater, ranging from a score of 40 for the lowest engaged to 80+ for the highest (the maximum (best) score is 100). How does this impact on turnover (and profit) at each depot?

We don’t need to conduct a nationwide customer survey covering every depot. Start with a limited pilot study to a random selection of customers in a single region, or a handful of depots under a willing and friendly area manager.

If your survey results could be joined up, what would you see? More importantly, what could you do with the knowledge?

I always get a sense of achievement every time we launch a survey for a client. Yes, it is a major milestone in the project, but now we also start to see something meaningful come out of all our and our client’s hard work…

At Surveylab, we monitor the first few responses coming in – and the responses will start coming in just a minute or two after you have hit send. We do this simply to check that everything is working correctly, and we also check the mailbox that the emails were sent from for out-of-office and other replies to indicate that email delivery was ok. If a customer survey has about a 3% response rate after one hour, we can expect a final response rate of about 20-30% when the survey closes. Employee surveys are typically much, much higher, although other factors do impact how quickly staff fill in their surveys.

While the survey is ‘open’ and collecting responses:

• Monitor survey responses daily
  At this stage you shouldn’t be concerned with viewing interim results – just check number of responses and completes. For employee surveys – look at the number of replies by department or location to identify where you particularly need to encourage participation!
• Monitor the survey mailbox
  Some employees may ask questions by replying to the email invitation. With customer surveys it is normal for a few customers to try communicating with your organisation by hitting reply to their survey invite. This is a good opportunity to engage with and help customers (especially the disgruntled complainers!)
• (Employee Surveys) Keep up the communications
  Continue to promote the survey once staff have access to the questionnaire. Chase heads of department and managers to pass the message on, offer a progress report (and thanks) – more than 300 of you have replied – make sure your view is counted…
• Send a reminder email to non-responders
  The quickest, most effective way to boost the survey response rate is to send another email to all the non-responders (filter out those who have already completed because it causes confusion and doubt). After about a week the responses will probably be trickling in. (Tip: we like to try and mail a reminder on a different day of the week to the initial invite, in case that day is more convenient/less busy for staff.)

Depending on how the survey is fielded*, most employee surveys are left open (collecting responses) for around three to four weeks. Printed questionnaires require longer. This usually allows sufficient time for those staff on holiday, sick leave or travelling to have an opportunity to take part.

* ‘Fielding’ is the term used to describe the period when invitations/reminders are sent out and responses are collected.

Was this post helpful?

We’ve written a  few ‘how-to’ posts about conducting an employee survey (many aspects also relate to customer surveys) – start here: Getting started with Employee Surveys – or you may like A checklist for testing your survey before you launch.

Need help with your next survey? Talk to Surveylab to pick our brains with no obligation! Learn more about our services for customer feedback and employee engagement surveys here.

If you’re looking for the PDF summary it can be downloaded here (or click on the diagram below).

What is the Impact of Bad Customer Care?

During my days at my last company there was folk-lore that the CEO would walk into a findings presentation to the Client and tell them

“Your Customer Service Centre is costing you money… and customers! It’s losing you business! You’d be better off to shut it down!”

The impact of a less-than satisfactory customer care experience is huge – as the chart below explains. The difference between a satisfied customer and one who has been mollified is a 4x greater willingness to recommend the company and more than 2.5 times willingness to buy again from the same company.

I wonder if the growth of Facebook and Twitter (and smartphones) means the average number of people told about a problem has increased significantly?

If you would like to learn more about the study, feel free to contact us. The UK survey is an offshoot of a US study (nicknamed The Rage Study) conducted by Customer Care Measurement & Consulting – more figures and commentary are available on their blog too.